Competition, Gatekeeping, and Health Care Access

Geir Godager, Tor Iversen and Ching-to Ma

No 2012:2, HERO Online Working Paper Series from University of Oslo, Health Economics Research Programme

Abstract: We study the impact of competition on primary care physicians’specialty referrals. Our data come from a Norwegian survey in 2008-9 and Statistics Norway. From the data we construct three measures of competition the number of open primary physician practices with and without population adjustment, and the Her…ndahl-Hirschman Index. We build a theoretical model, and derive two opposing e¤ects of competition on gatekeeping physicians’ specialty referrals. The empirical results suggest that competition has negligible or small positive e¤ects on referrals. Our results do not support the policy claim that increasing the number of primary care physicians reduces secondary care.

Keywords: primary; care; physicians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2012-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Competition, gatekeeping, and health care access (2015)
Working Paper: Competition, Gatekeeping, and Health Care Access (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:oslohe:2012_002

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